Keeping tabs on competitors
Hey product folks, how do you guys keep tabs on your competitors? What information do you generally look for?
Being from a tech background, I go in-depth on everything like website changes, new marketing campaign launch, using their product, new product launches, new hiring posts (possibility of expansion), annual reports etc. in depth. I spend a lot of time doing this, and it gets too immersive sometimes, deviating me from my work.
Are there any tools that can help automate this?
During my tenure at one of the B2B SaaS unicorn, we use to list competition releases/features at quarterly rhythm. In our growth phase, we use to keep ~20% roadmap bandwidth to bring parity with competition. I would say observing competition depends on the nature of business. In B2B SaaS, especially where you try to replace the incumbents, customer can directly ask for features which they are used to in legacy product.
For Microsoft folks, use Edge to keep tabs 😆